As is known in the art, virtualization was brought about by two main economic factors: the need to increase utilization and the need to simplify management of systems. With regard to servers, virtual servers have brought up utilization of servers from about 20%-30% to 80% and higher, and have simplified management by packaging the whole application environment into one unit.
Various attempts have been made to virtualize storage systems. Products such as EMC's Invista and IBM's SVC pool storage from existing disk arrays while providing basic storage management functions to the storage pool. Unfortunately, these products block the services provided by the existing disk arrays. These services may include local and remote replication, data copy, data provisioning, etc. When using these products, the disk array is reduced to providing only raw capacity (e.g. 500 GB) of storage. Since most of the value of the disk array is in the services provided and not in the raw capacity, these products essentially eliminate most of the value of disk arrays.
Further, these products do not necessarily simplify management of storage systems. The existing disk arrays are still physically on the floor and need to be managed, while the new storage pool now needs to be managed using a separate set of management tools.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for virtualizing data storage systems.